UK premiere of 'Kashf' / Q&A with Director Ayesha Khan

(@ the UK's first Himalaya Film Festival, currently on in London)

Kashf - The Lifting of the Veil is a fascinating exploration of questions of destiny, and takes us into the worlds of Sufism (the mystical heart of Islam) and Lollywood dreams.

I especially liked the style of it - it felt very fresh, raw, and all the more so for hearing from director Ayesha Khan of the "guerilla-style" film-making process. Shot in 28 days on a very low budget, the result was a genre-bending fusion of camcorder documentary, Lollywood cinema, and 'conventional' film crew work (although the crew later appear on screen as cinema audience!).

A young man returns to Lahore, the city of his birth, and begins to uncover mystical circumstances around his conception and the promise his mother made to a Sufi Pir, that in adulthood he would take the Sufi path. Meanwhile, his cousin is also being drawn into another established tradition in Lahore's culture as he pursues his calling to be an actor.

With dream sequences and hallucinations, magic realism is a strong element - reality is explored through apparent non-reality, and the physical and metaphysical merge. A most interesting aspect of this upturning and unveiling is Director turns Actor, as Ayesha Khan literally melds onto the screen and becomes a major presence in its landscape.

As the pull on our hero towards his spiritual destination becomes irresistibly and irreversibly stronger, he is told: "you have to acknowledge you're on the path." This film is about facing up to destiny, and meeting it, and is about the quest we each face to find out who we are and why we are here.

I enjoyed that this film took me to the streets and doors, and sometimes behind those doors, of Lahore (the green door is a strong motif in the film). Ayesha was just great too - I admired that she had made the film as an experiment: rather than go to film school, why not just try to make a film? And I admired her a m a z i n g l o n g hair!